Dravid praises stand-in skipper Rishabh Pant after South Africa series draw

The fifth T20I between India and South Africa was washed out with 3.3 overs bowled in the first innings at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore on Sunday. The series finished at a 2-2 draw. 

India head coach Rahul Dravid, after the abandoned game, highlighted how important Rishabh Pant is for the team’s furture, especially keeping the upcoming T20 World Cup in mind. The 23-year-old was made stand-in skipper after Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul missed the series. However, he has managed only 58 runs in the five innings that led to some questions being raised about his place in the shortest format.

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“Personally, he would have liked to score a few more runs but it is not concerning him. Certainly, he is a very big part of our plans going ahead in next few months,” Dravid said during the post-match press conference.

He further added that he will not judge a player based on two or three games. 

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“I just don’t want to be critical. In the middle overs, you need people to play slightly attacking brand of cricket, to take the game on a little more. Sometimes it’s very hard to judge it based on two or three games,” the head coach said.

While Rishabh Pant could not score many runs, his captaincy in the last two T20Is – Visakhapatnam and Rajkot – was commended. India were 0-2 down in the series. The team pulled two important wins and started as favourites on Sunday. 

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“To bring a team back from 0-2 down and to level it at 2-2 and give us a chance to win was good. Captaincy is not about wins and losses only. He (Pant) is a young captain, growing as leader. It is too early to judge him and you don’t want to do that after one series,” Dravid said. 

Dravid spoke about Pant’s impressive 158 plus strike rate in IPL 2022. 

“I think he had a pretty good IPL in terms of strike-rate even though it might not have looked good on averages. In IPL, he looked to move up a little bit (in terms of averages) and probably three years ago he was on those numbers. We are hoping that we can get those numbers from him at the international level,” he said.